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It’s all about respect for Canadian values: DiManno

Prospective Canadians should be made aware of what won’t be tolerated, as much as the native-born.

Conservative leadership contender Kellie Leitch has sparked a fire storm with her suggestion that prospective immigrants should be vetted for "anti-Canadian values." (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Nobody ever asked my parents, when they arrived in this country as singletons in the mid-50s, if they ascribed to Canadian values.

I wish someone had.

Maybe then their teenage daughter would have been permitted to attend her own high school graduation party. Because girls in my family were not allowed out in the evenings without a chaperone — as in the old country. Maybe then endless domestic dramas might have been averted. Maybe then I wouldn’t have grown up with the very real fear that I’d never make it out of my house alive.

If, in retrospect, my terrors were exaggerated, the same can’t be said for other daughters, other wives, subjected to the inflexible tyranny of patriarchal dynamics.

Girls who lie and scheme in order to have some semblance of a normal life — without ending up, as the Shafia daughters and their cast-off “aunt” (first spouse in a polygamous marriage to their father, Mohammad Shafia) did, drowned at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, murdered by father, mother and older brother in an “honour killing.’’

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Or Aqsa Parvez, the 16-year-old of Pakistani descent, strangled in her Mississauga bedroom — father and brother pleaded guilty — because she wouldn’t abide by the family’s strict rules; wanted to dress like her friends; reviled the hijab. Or the 19-year-old in Montreal, stabbed by her Afghan mother for staying out all night. Or the young woman and her fiancé, gunned down by her brother outside an Ottawa shopping mall, purportedly — the Crown argued — because their engagement had been opposed by the female’s father.

Consider the many daughters and mothers who don’t dare defy traditional and religious customs by going bare-headed, enjoying high school social life, making their own choices — as young people must learn through trial and error.

Consider that female circumcision is mutilation.

Consider that it’s fundamentally wrong, refusing to remove a facial veil during a citizenship ceremony and a federal court that struck down the then-Conservative government’s attempt to ban the niqab and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals dropping a planned appeal to the Supreme Court. A PM who unabashedly shows off his topless body. Male body.

Although most of the horrific examples cited above all relate to individuals and families of Islamic faith, this is not a matter exclusive to pious Muslims. Oppression, particularly against females, exists in many cultures, justified on cultural and religious grounds. Those cultures have been exported to Canada — as my parents brought their narrow-minded attitudes to Toronto — because clinging to the old feels stabilizing amid an alien ethos. Except Canadian values aren’t alien in Canada.

Canadians, a reasonable people, grasp this instinctively. Which is why polls showed overwhelming support of the proposed niqab ban, even as opinion-shapers scolded the citizenry for their alleged prejudices. Which is why a Forum Research Inc. poll commissioned by the Star — the results published Saturday — revealed that two-thirds of respondents want prospective immigrants screened for “anti-Canadian’’ values, as proposed by Conservative MP Kellie Leitch, the Tory leader candidate’s overture landing with a thud even within her own party.

Sixty-seven per cent agreed immigrants should be screened on those unmentionable values; 27 per cent believed equality is the most important of those values (followed by patriotism, fairness and tolerance); 68 per cent opposed wearing the niqab during citizenship ceremonies; 29 per cent think the niqab should be prohibited in public — yet almost 60 per cent agreed that the state shouldn’t tell women how to dress.

So, like me, the niqab is viewed as repugnant in an open-face society — however much those (some) who cover their faces claim to do so voluntarily — yet the corrective of a proscription against any apparel of clothing is just as distasteful.

Go ahead: tell all those Canadians that they’re racists and Islamophobic. Which would make us a wretched nation indeed.

We are not.

To slam the reasonable as intrinsically biased — you just don’t know it, folks — is staggeringly condescending. It’s mean.

At least the Star ran the poll findings prominently, however the results may have clashed with editorial board positions. Reminded me of the Washington Post — an influential newspaper strongly critical of the Washington Redskins clinging to their “offensive” name — forthrightly publishing the eye-opening contents of a poll commissioned to measure the attitudes of Native Americans towards “Redskins.”

The outcome was massaged to tacitly criticize respondents for not sharing the paper’s view: “Nine in 10 Native Americans say they are not offended by the Washington Redskins name, according to a new Washington Post poll that shows how few ordinary Indians have been persuaded by a national movement to change the football team’s moniker,” the Post reported on May 19. “Among the Native Americans reached over a five-month period ending in April, more than 7 in 10 said they did not feel the word ‘Redskin’ was disrespectful to Indians. An even higher number — 8 in 10 — said they would not be offended if a non-native called them that name.”

So now the paper knows what Native Americans think. They, the newspaper, just don’t think much of it. Must have made the Washington Post editorial board crazy — because clearly they know best. I’d be interested to know how many Native Americans work for the Post’s editorial board.

Up here, the Leitch suggestion has been roundly assailed as foolish and pandering to bigots, a dog-whistle to populist intolerance. I’ll leave to others to analyze Leitch’s motivations and the impact of her proposal on the leadership race. But I adamantly dispute the assertion that standardized Canadian values can’t be quantified, as if it’s all uncharted territory and who gets to decide anyway and by what right should those ethics be imposed on anybody?

The howlers act as if we’ve never collectively agreed on benchmark principles before. To which I would point out: Criminal Code, the most basic how-to, secular bible of thou-shall-not. Because a society has every right in the world to delineate the unacceptable, and agreeing on the unacceptable is no theoretical exercise. Only polemics make it complicated.

As a nation, Canada opens its arms to immigrants. We share our privileges. I am among the deeply grateful. That must not change. But don’t try to change what’s so admirable and alluring about us, either. Don’t spin reasonable accommodation into orthodoxy of diversity and moral equivalence.

It’s entirely proper to know — to be told — what Canada stands for, including the freedom to practise any faith. But so too should prospective Canadians be made aware of what won’t be tolerated, just as it should be for the native-born.

I’ve no real wish to vet for values by screening immigrants. But respecting those values — gender equality, racial equality, sexual identity — should be a pledge we all take, born Canadians and immigrants.

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